The front pages of the main newspapers in the world looked like those posters from the American Far West that said “Wanted, dead or alive” next to the face of the villain wanted by justice, because the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) declares Vladimir Putin an outlaw world.
Ordering the capture of the Russian president does not change his material situation much, but it is one more sign of the weakening of his image on a global scale.
Until now, the Hague-based court has not dared to call for the arrest of sitting rulers, let alone the leader of a superpower on the UN Security Council. He did not demand, for example, the arrest of George W. Bush, despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in addition to having turned that Arab country into a black hole that spent years festering lunatic and bloodthirsty jihadism, could constitute a crime. of aggression.
One of the four crimes typified by the Rome Statute, which in 1998 created the ICC, is the crime of aggression and that would have been committed by Bush Jr. First, because it was never possible to prove links between the Iraqi Baathist regime and Al Qaeda, which in the crack of Sunni Islam are on opposing paths. And also because the US marines did not find the weapons of mass destruction with which the White House justified that invasion, despite the fact that the inspections by the team of experts headed by the Swede Hans Blix had revealed that the weapons no longer existed in Iraqi territory. arsenals that Saddam Hussein had owned.
The ICC could also have indicted Chinese leaders for the “re-education camps” in which they attempt the forced acculturation of the Uyghur ethnic group. But he didn’t either. That shows immense limitations and feeds the Kremlin’s argument to disqualify the arrest warrant against the Russian president.
Even so, what was resolved by the ICC strongly impacts against Vladimir Putin. Russia did not ratify the Rome Statute, as did the United States and China. Ukraine did not ratify it either, but President Zelenski accepted that the ICC judge possible war crimes in this conflict. Therefore, the Court in The Hague has jurisdiction to rule on all the actors in the war that is taking place in Ukraine.
With that mandate, prosecutor Karim Khan prioritized the kidnapping and deportation of children on a large scale, a crime easily charged against Putin and the other accused Russian authority, Maria Lvova-Belova, no less than the official in charge of ensuring the rights of childhood in Russia.
The accusation against them was at the hands of the prosecutor Karim Khan because both made many public statements bragging about having “rescued Ukrainian children”, considering it a positive action for those thousands of minors taken from their country and handed over to Russian families.
It is lapidary for the president of a superpower that has the right to veto in the UN, from now on being forbidden the possibility of traveling to any of the 123 countries that signed and ratified the Rome Statute. Nor does it look good on the Kremlin chief’s resume to be on a list of hideous criminals.
On that list appears former dictator Omar Hasan Ahmad al Bashir, who ruled Sudan for three decades and was tried in The Hague for “genocide” and crimes against humanity against the population of Darfur, a region where he perpetrated criminal ethnic cleansing. There is also the bloodthirsty Congolese soldier Bosco Ntaganda, sentenced to 30 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed by the guerrilla he led, the Patriotic Front for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC), against the Lendu ethnic group, in the east of the African country. .
Sentenced by the same court that wants to try Putin were the bloodthirsty Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratco Mladic, responsible for the worst atrocity committed in Europe since World War II until the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the massacre perpetrated in Srebrenica in 1996, during the ethnic cleansing they carried out in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, responsible for the war in Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, was sentenced by an International Criminal Court specially created by the UN for crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Other criminal dictators were sentenced for crimes like those stipulated in the Rome Statute, but not by the Hague court but by national courts. These are the cases of the Chadian Hissene Habre, who was tried in a Senegalese court for the crimes he had committed in Chad; the Egyptian Hosni Mubarak, sentenced in a Cairo court for the deaths caused by the repression of the protests in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, and the Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Mont, who exterminated tens of thousands of Mayan indigenous people in the cleanup ethnic violence that he perpetrated between 1980 and 1981.
Surely the world will not see Putin sitting in the ICC’s dock, but the arrest warrant issued against him puts him on that list of despicable characters. And his first reaction was not adequate to remove the villain label.
He appeared at night walking in Mariupol, the city on the Azov Sea where his army bombed the theater where hundreds of civilians were hiding from Russian bombs.
Putin’s biggest problem with the ICC is that the crimes he has been charged with and those he will charge against him are in full view of the world. Massacres of civilians like the one committed in Bucha constitute crimes against humanity. Recruiting inexperienced soldiers in remote corners of the Caucasus and Siberia to send them in waves to die under the bullets of the Ukrainian defenses in order to deplete their ammunition, as well as using an army of ruthless mercenaries like those of the Wagner Group, will be acts seen as war crimes.
The sum will give, like the Holodomor committed by Stalin in the ’30s, the crime of genocide. And the invasion that it launched in February 2022 against a country that had not attacked Russia in any way constitutes a crime of aggression because there is no cause that justifies unleashing the hell that devours Ukraine.
In this way, the head of the Kremlin will have committed the four crimes established in the Rome Statute as jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That justifies why the front pages of the main world media have looked like those posters from the Wild West, with the photo of the “wanted” outlaw.
